Well, I just can't understand this life. Maybe it is impossible to understand. I feel so sad, really so deeply sad, because everything seems to go wrong. But deep down I know that nothing is going wrong, everything is just happening, connected to other things, and changing. And that it is my thinking that is going wrong. I am constantly looking at things the wrong way, thinking what is GOOD and what is BAD and what I want and what I don't want, very often seeing the past and wishing I could watch it all again, right in front of me like a theatre play, and enjoy seeing myself doing things, saying things, liking and hating things, while separated by the safe gap between past and present. I could mock myself and laugh at my idiotic behaviour, rue the mistakes and understand all those many, many things that I was absolutely nowhere near understanding at the actual time they were happening.

But then I would not really be living. Like watching an old film I would become sleepy after the initial amazement at seeing me, aged 22, in a cloud of desperate confusion, making the stupid decision to leave someone, who I loved so much, or aged 16, alone, walking along a beach in England with my life entirely unlived, all before me and virgin, knowing it would be only a wonderful fantasy. Or just aged 30, when I wept in agony, after drinking so much whisky at my birthday celebration in Lhasa, that I could not remember what it was I was crying about, the next day when I woke up.

My eyes will water and twitch, and I will have to stop it, stop watching the fantasy, reality film of my past life, and lie down to sleep, and dream the dream of reality in the present, where we are nothing more than the totality of our relation with everything else in this moment. After all, what are we and what is this life? Isn't it what we all are trying to understand, when we are not running away from it? Is it love? Being? Not being? Are we truly better off sharing our days, efforts, bodies and feelings with one other person, who saves us as we save them? Is that a balanced reality? I wonder, because I cannot stop thinking about it, as if my very mode of existence were a hallucination of the spectrum of self and other, of loneliness and comfort when one is not alone. If the answer is there, I wish I would find it, or hear it, for is not suffering one undivided thing that we all share? We think we are suffering alone, but suffering is the same wherever you look. And to escape from it is identical, whoever you are, however you look and wherever you seek and find relief.

So we have to accept the disappointment of wasted opportunity, squandered time and lost love. We have to let go of the need to safeguard our safety in this existence and grasp the unknown and feared, otherwise what shall we do? Keep running? Suddenly, after a full, interesting and mostly happy life, I find I am nothing. I have no centre and no identity. And others that I see around me suffer from the same affliction. Are you not suffering the same way as I am? Are you not afraid of letting your family down and also afraid of insecurity, danger, suffering and death, alone? Do you not also fear being unable to help your loved ones? Being useless? Do you feel the responsibility of your uncreated life, that which has not happened, could be so supportive to others and productive in the term that is there for us to walk this earth? I am sure you do, for you are no different to me. We have to live this life, however imperfect it is, however it disappoints us, wherever we have the opportunity to drink it's precious air into ourselves. For if we give up on just living, and turn to fearing and living in refuge of that fear, the fear will chase us forever, and fear never tires of running, suffers not from cold or pain and feels no remorse. It will keep on coming until we root it out from within, along with the suffering.

Nothing is going wrong, it can only be true to say that what I think IS, is something totally different to that which really truly IS. And there is the problem.